Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/71

52 are the writings of Boson, Bodenor's Letter to Daines Barrington, some of the Gwavas MS. letters and songs, and the story of John of Chy-an-Hur. These, written by men who spoke Cornish fluently and had no theories and often no knowledge of philology, probably represent what people really spoke in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That faintness and even silence of final letters, which seems to have been a characteristic of Cornish as it is of French, was the cause that, in writing as phonetically as they knew how, these practical speakers of Cornish often omitted the ends of words, and made it seem as though their verbs had largely lost their inflections. Words were spelt alike which should have been differentiated— it was as though one should spell avais, avait, avez, and avaient all alike, and words were run together that should have had at least apostrophes between them; but the grammar was not always as broken-down as it looks, and by a comparison with the older remains of Cornish it is not difficult to restore approximately the proper spelling. The Cornish represented in Lhuyd's writings has tended to confuse some things. Lhuyd was a Welshman, and is constantly trying to run off into Welsh, and he had for his teacher John Keigwin, who thought that he understood the Cornish of the mediaeval dramas, but was often mistaken. Probably had a resuscitated mediæval Cornishman read the dramas aloud to Keigwin, he would have understood them quite as well as the ordinary English boardschool boy would understand St. Paul's Epistles in the Authorised Version, read by a revived Jacobean divine; but the spelling and the mediæval handwriting, which he could not always read, put him out terribly, and some very weird forms and words are the result. Also Keigwin had, or thought he had, a knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, which he uses on occasions with dire results. Far be it from any Cornish student to undervalue the